Tag Archives: Law

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methods of behavioral change

This morning I observed a woman park in a handicapped spot and then walk away pulling two large suitcases with nary a limp. So unless she was taking that luggage to her husband’s wheelchair office, I’d bet a substantial margin of my limited international gold reserves that’s she’s illegally parked.

I see this all the time, mostly at work. I figure probably a third of those parked in handicapped spots are not actually crippled in any way. I cannot morally comprehend executing such an action. It would legitimately make me uncomfortable, all day, to know I did that. But apparently folks are cool with it, it becomes part of their routine.

Maybe this isn’t a big deal. Or those folks are actually quite nice dudes, and this is just one of their flaws. And if humanity has anything, it’s a whole bunch of flaws. But for whatever reason, any time I see this happen it bothers or even angers me immensely. I nearly said something unfortunate to that woman this morning. I’m glad I kept my mouth shut, for I gather that would not have ended well or accomplished a thing.

Anyways, let’s accept that this is bad behavior requiring correction. But we’ll need help, because humans are flawed weak flesh beings. So we’ll use Enforcement Drone Version 2.09 (ED209) as our assistant in this matter.

1) Guilt

Person wrongly parks in spot. ED209 saunters up and wryly comments to the individual in his stale robot voice.

ED209: YOU ARE NOT HANDICAPPED. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.

2) Shame

ED209 walks up, and demands production of identification. ED209 then takes a photo of the person’s face.

ED209: THIS INDICENT HAS NOW BEEN POSTED TO YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE.

3) Fear

ED209 walks up and shoots the individual in the kneecap.

ED209: YOU ARE NOW IN COMPLIANCE WITH ESTABLISHED PARKING REGULATIONS.

4) Punishment

As the person walks away, ED209 combusts their vehicle in a fireball that shatters nearby windows.

ED209: YOU WILL NOW BE ASSESSED THE VARIOUS DAMANGE, CLEANUP, AND ENVIRONMENTAL FEES.

5) Morality

ED209 forces them to sit down for a five hour chat on the various moral considerations involved with improperly parking in the handicapped spot, making a clear case for the values of a balanced ethical society.

6) Apathy

ED209 slowly trots by the person as they walk away from their car but offers no comment or correction, hoping over time the individual in question establishes some type of internal corrective action guided by conscience.

Which ones of these will work? I’ll let you decide.

ed209

Awh, isn’t he cute?

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Obama nominates amorphous lifeform to Court

Let’s face it, nobody knows who this guy is.  It’s like Obama rolled around in a nondescript black van from Peter’s Opulent Tea & Unlimited Shoppe (POTUS), and just grabbed some dude off the street at 3am as he was walking back wasted from the bar.

And the guy’s in the back of the van screaming, pinned to the floor by a half-dozen Secret Service agents.  Then Obama, smoking, leans down and whispers.  And the guy, drunk as he is, knows it’s the Prez, so he quiets down.  Obama: “Howdy.  How’d you like to be my Supreme Court pick, buddy?”  [pulls on cig]

Okay, I guess, if you happen to be a part of the ruling legal / political / media establishment of DC, you knew who Merrick Garland was before this morning.  But the rest of us don’t.  Is this dude qualified?  I have no idea.  Neither do you.  Perhaps the ruling legal / political / media establishment does?  I have no idea.

But it’s like Obama picked the most faceless wonder you could imagine.  Why did he do that?  Who knows, clearly there must have been some political calculation, I guess.  But I’ll tell you what, both sides are going to paint these next few months like Garland’s holding the keys to a vault that possesses the souls of 16K cute kitties and puppies.  It’s going to be absurd.  It’s going to be sad.

garland

Garland: “I uh, promise, to uh, be a good judge.  Yeah, yeah, the best judge.  On that Supreme of all Courts.”  [Obama pulls on cig]

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Chicago – again & again & again & a t-rex

All your carefully laid life plans are worthless.  The universe is driving, you’re just in the backseat.  Sometimes you’re screaming, other times you’re back there giggling.  It’s all good.  As long as somebody decent like Santa Claus is driving, and not some type of coked-out-Aztec-death-god, you’re probably doing okay.

Last year I got it in my head to travel to Chicago for the first time in some sort of joyful ride to stave of mental insanity.  It was a highly successful journey.  And I wondered when I’d be back in Chicago.  I figured many, many years.

No, one year.  For work decided my new travel location would shift from Texas to Chicago.  So whereas a trip to Chicago was so very, very unique, now I’ll be there all the time.

This is of course a very good thing, I hope.  Hopefully work doesn’t detonate my view of the cooler things in life I experienced there.  But I did try and start things off on the right foot.

I got to Chicago a day early, before work, to avoid any difficulties in getting there on time for the first day.  So I took that early day and went back downtown.  I visited some of the restaurants I went to the last time, because I’m a big loser and wasn’t willing to risk a new place just yet.

But the one difference was I went to the Field Museum.  They have a ton of stuff there, most of it great, and I might write about some of the exhibits later.  They also have a t-rex.  They named it Sue after the lady who found it.

Sue

It’s the largest, best preserved t-rex bone pile on the planet.  The Field Museum paid nearly $8M to take it off the hands of the dude who’s land Sue found it on.  When you read about the legal drama that unfolded to bring this skeleton to Chicago, it’s enough to make you yearn for the scene in Jurassic Park where the lawyer gets eaten whilst he was seated upon the can.

This was the only photo I took at Field, but the shot doesn’t do it justice.  It’s a huge creature, but yet at the time I still remarked to my lunatic brain, “Wow, I thought it’d be bigger.”  I truly did.  So this of course does further confirm that I’m an idiot, as this is a seven-ton monster.

An interesting note is that’s not Sue’s actual skull.  The real skull is on the second floor in a glass box.  It’s simply too heavy to put on the actual skeleton without running a pole to the chin, which was probably a wise aesthetic choice.  They figure Sue was about 28 years old when he or she checked out to Dino Valhalla in a dry stream bed, bound for history.

It would have been quite the view if you could actually see one of these dino dudes for real.  So I have this idea, to bring the dinosaurs to life.  We’d probably need to clone them or something.  So I figure we can get their DNA from some Dominican amber.  We grab the dino DNA from the blood inside the mosquito inside the amber.  Then we get some geneticists to do their thing.  And when I have their results, I use their complex data to build a big robot dinosaur.  What am I supposed to do, breed a live one?  Do you have any idea how high that food bill would be?  Sue would eat, like, four or five cows a day, probably?  And think of how much beer Sue would drink, and I’d have to buy it, because I can’t say no to a seven ton monster.  Who’s got the cash for all that?  Not me.

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you will be made to pay

The other day I strolled into my neighborhood shopette to purchase a pack of alcoholic beverages known locally as beer. I struggled to determine which style I desired to buy as I’m generally indecisive and as there are so many delicious options. But then I was shocked as I felt a sharp pain at the base of my back and I quickly found myself being led down the beer case aisle with a firm hand on my shoulder.

“Just right this way, Sir; just right this way,” the man said. I thought about struggling but it seemed as if the man could read my mind for as I made to break free the pain in my back increased and I realized I had a knife to my spine. I managed to glance over my shoulder and I was aghast to find my captor was no less than The Monopoly Man.

Our journey concluded in front of the ubiquitous Bud and Miller case. For of course they’re usually side by side. “Pick one,” The Monopoly Man whispered seductively in my ear. Sweating, and scared out of my mind, I meekly uttered, “Which one?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he firmly responded. Five minutes later I departed the shopette with a six pack of Bud or Miller. I can’t remember which as I was too concerned with the fact that I’d soiled myself shortly after The Monopoly Man returned the switchblade to his pocket and disappeared behind a Grolsch display case, never to be seen again.

bud

Why yes, yes it is.

$104B is a lot of money for a beer company. $104B is a lot of money for anything. $104B could buy you ten nuclear aircraft carriers or 20 years of budget for America’s PEPFAR anti-AIDS program. But AB InBev is using it to absorb SABMiller. Why? Straight cash, folks.

Should you care? After all, nobody is made to buy beer. Alcohol is scientifically a poison to your body. It’s why you get drunk. So technically speaking, I don’t suppose there’s any reasonable difference between deliberately ingesting alcohol, and deliberately ingesting drain cleaner. It’s just that one is more poisonous than the other. Except that beer is tastier, so there’s that.

But this purchase is the latest in a trend. Depending on where you live, there are only about three mobile phone providers you get to choose from. The health insurance companies are merging now too. Experts predict that eventually instead of having five health insurance companies that there’ll be only three soon enough.

The health insurance companies claim they need these mergers to keep costs down. So good news, your health insurance cost will go down over the next five years. Guaranteed. They’ll swear to it.

The problem with capitalism is you need genuine competition for it to work. Otherwise you get something other than capitalism.

AB InBev has shelled out $24.3M in political campaign contributions equally split between the parties, as well as $102.3M on lobbying the government. SABMiller’s numbers are $2.1M and $21.0M, smaller, but still equally split between the parties. Hmm, why would they give an equal amount of cash to each party?

You certainly shouldn’t really care about AB InBev and SABMiller. Instead, you can just always buy tasty Yuengling.

But I suspect you do care about health insurance. Or the cost of your phone plan, seeing as how you can’t compete in the modern knowledge economy without one. How about the cost of your Internets? Or your power bill?

The same thing is happening to them all. You will be made to pay. The Monopoly Man is sure of it.

The Monopoly Man

“Terribly sorry old chap but you’ll be made to pay lest you force me to slice you open.”

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it’s amazing what people can get away with

I’m not a car guy. I drive a semi-derelict clunker that carries more weight in dog hair than human cargo. But when I heard about this VW emissions thing, even I’m shocked that they got away with this for so long. And I’m a real cynical guy to begin with.

For the technically uninitiated (me), a modern vehicle is required to be OBD-II compliant. The On-Board-Diagnostic capability provides, among many other functions, the option to test emissions levels via that port thingy usually located near your left shin. So rather than testing the vehicle’s emission via the tailpipe, OBD-II allows the port to tell the tester how much gunk the vehicle is spewing into the atmosphere.

As best as I can gather, VW and it’s Audi subsidiary altered the computer program so that when the car detected a test was going on via the OBD-II port, that the program lied and changed the engine output readings to read in standards when they were not.

Which to me begs the question: Why were governments not also testing vehicle emission compliance via random tailpipe tests to ensure the computer wasn’t lying and/or flawed? Or if they were doing tailpipe tests, why were they not able to detect that these cars were spewing many, many times their specified limits.

Man, government can get really dumb. One of the key (if not the number one) wins of climate change policy has been the supposed reduction of car pollution. Where does that leave the entire political effort if car manufacturers can just lie their asses off for years to the tune of millions of cars?

You think governments would have been a little more diligent in checking the automakers’ work. Yet I have read / heard frequently experts claim that if VW was doing this, other carmakers are too. Wow. So it’s amazing what people can get away with.

It was all there to begin with too. I just Googled “tailpipe testing” and the first thing that comes up is a 2013 brief from some guy named Antonio Multari.

In the brief he says such enlightening things as:

 

“OBD specially on diesel engines is not covering all emission aspects”

“European studies show that a variety of serious defects of emission systems in diesel engines will not be identified by OBD.”

“Tailpipe emissions may increase by more than 10 times without being detected by OBD !”

 

That was 2 1/2 years ago. In today’s 14 minute news cycle, why did this take so long? Here’s my guess:

 

Engineer: “Herr Chairman, our tests show the clean diesel engine isn’t actually clean.”

Herr Chairman: “Too late, we’re marketing it as it; just rewrite the OBD software to lie.”

ENG: “Huh! Herr Chairman that’s illegal, I’ll have no part in such a crime.”

HC: “You’ll do it or I’ll sack you, sue you, and you’ll never work in the car industry again.”

ENG: “Oh.”

HC: “Get to work.

ENG: “But Herr Chairman, surely governments will notice. For even if we lie on the OBD software test, they can just test via the tailpipe.”

HC: “Fuck ‘em. If they claim that we’ll sue. And then we’ll hire our own experts to discredit their tailpipe tests. Then we’ll hire lobbyists to bribe politicians and bureaucrats worldwide. And we’ll use the finest marketing gurus since Delta City to prove clean diesel is real.”

ENG: “Herr Chairman, I must say the breadth of your evil is unspeakable.”

HC: “Get to work.” [lights cigar]

 

Is this above scenario too cynical and extreme for your tastes? Consider this, VW debuted the clean diesel cars in 2009. In other words, they’ve been lying for six years and got away with it until last week.

vw diesel

der Lügner

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vicious EU uncertainty begins today

There are legit arguments for both sides of the refugee / migrant issue. Just as there are legit arguments for both ends of the austerity debate. But until today the EU had never done something like this before: they rammed through a major piece of legislation over the objections of several countries.

When the Greeks were asked to vote last weekend they returned Syriza to power and thus explicitly endorsed the most recent EU backed bailout plan. That same plan also required the endorsement of Germany’s parliament among several other national elected bodies. In other words, democracy and the votes of individual citizens came into play.

Maybe the EU council thinks they can dictate refugee / migrant policy over the heads of all / some amount of voters. But I doubt it. So when the Czech Republic government refuses to take their mandated allocation quota of humanity, what’s the EU council going to do? Fine them?

The guidance states: “Financial penalty of 0.002% of GDP for those member countries refusing to accept relocated migrants.” Ah, I see. Well, what if they don’t pay up? Then what?

Hungry and Romania are full EU members; the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Finland are all in the Euro. What happens if they’re forced to implement this policy against their will or what happens if they ignore it, and nobody forces them? Either way, the entire construct of the EU could come apart.

What happens to modern Europe if the EU comes apart? Or massively shrinks?

You can think this is a good thing or bad thing, but either way it’s monumental and rather fascinating. When the Syrian war started four years ago I’m not sure anybody would have predicted this kind of consequence. Yet here it is.

For good economies, culture, and just straight peace of mind, vicious uncertainty is not a thing to desire. But that’s what we’re going to get here for all of Europe for some time. Uncertainty.

_85678906_european_commission_quotas-01_v2

and oh by the way; 120K might only be about 10% of the current number of refugees / migrants; what’s the plan for the rest of them?

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Obama adds third unplanned stop to African itinerary

The Washington press pool struggled to rearrange schedules as the Obama administration announced without notice that the President will now also visit Libya’s famed Kaf Ajnoun or Mountain of Ghosts. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained the move as, “An appropriate means to wrap up our trip in keeping with the President’s theme of meeting with horrible human beings.”

The concluding visit to one of Satan’s known earthly dwellings will follow Obama’s forthcoming sit downs with famed war criminal Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya and Hailemariam “The Street Sweeper” Desalegn in Ethiopia. In Addis Ababa, Obama is also scheduled to address the African Union.

Although the AU is said to be interested in rescheduling the speech’s start time due to an imminent AU vote to unanimously ratify the title of “Imperial Majesty for Life” to Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza, a move supported by America’s State Department. The AU is also set to reconfirm its annual stipend to Omar al-Bashir’s private aircraft corporation Speedy provided its “no notice use for all” clause remains intact.

While at Kaf Ajnoun, Obama will spend time at such key sites as The Road to Hell and The Devil’s Hill. Said Earnest, “Since he came to Washington, the President has learned the diplomatic dark arts like the best of them. He figures it’s time he paid his due respect to those who have enabled the ghoulish powers he now possesses. In fact, I’m told the State Department Bureau of African Affairs insisted on this stopover.”

Earnest also mentioned several other critical American goals during the trip including talks to get more of Angola’s oil than China, additional tank, tear gas, & piano wire sales to Egypt, and the forthcoming pool renovation contract by Halliburton of a mysteriously unknown but supposedly important villa in South Africa.

When asked by reporters if Obama worried about potential human rights protestors during his speech in Addis Ababa, Earnest wryly chuckled, “You ah, you don’t really understand how things work here, do you?”

kaf-ajnoun-ghost-mountain

Arcturus News Muster – 23 July 2015

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on beer, breweries, airlines, airports, collusion, and selling out

So the airlines are supposedly colluding on price, eh? Who would have thought? I did. But I’m just some guy who flies regularly. I’m not a big shot at the Justice Department. But my Guests and I just did a brief half-hour of research to confirm what we’ve always suspected. It will undoubtedly take the Justice Department five months and $18M to do what I just did.

Kindly observe this tale of two airports: Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport & Manchester–Boston Regional Airport.

So I went to Priceline Senόr Bancό de Rόbber Bill Shatner’s website to fly between these two locations. I chose 10-12 November to:

– Eliminate the possibility of last minute flight booking disparities

– Non-holiday week

– Not on a Friday or the weekend

– Random boring normal week

Manchester to Phoenix NOV

And, hmm, I get $347 with Delta and United, and American / US Air is within 7%. So why are Delta and United charging the exact same price? So I figure, okay, maybe Bill’s got an inside Star Trek deal in place with Delta and United. So I journey directly to the Delta and United websites to get it straight from the airline’s maul.

United 348

United gives a figure of $348 or $1 off Shatner.

Delta 355

Delta’s $355 or a whole $7 more than Shatner.

Just to further investigate I strolled over to Southwest and no points for guessing how much they charge for this flight.

Southwest 348

Yeah.

So of the four major airlines (all now under Justice Department investigation) three of them charge the exact same price. The other is a whole 7% more expensive. I see. Yeah.

So is all of this just a coincidence? That $348 is just how much it costs to fly from Manchester to Phoenix and none of the airlines can mess with that price?

Put another way, none of these airlines seem interested in providing a price different from the others, so they could, like, make money. You know, compete with the other airlines for your business to make a higher profit than the other airline. Capitalism, competition, etc?

So are the airlines colluding on price? I’ll let you decide. But the answer’s yes.

Speaking of reasons why collusion occurs, it seems presidential candidates have taken it upon themselves to conduct campaign events at breweries. Why?

– Everybody loves beer

– Get to pose with industrial looking equipment

– Meet hard working Americans not yet replaced by some dude in Shenzhen

– Everybody loves beer

bush brewery

Here we see Bush 3 at Four Peaks Brewery in Arizona.

clinton brewery

And here we see Clinton 2 at Smuttynose Brewery in New Hampshire.

I like these breweries. Smuttynose’s Robust Porter is first rate.

Robust Porter

I’ve only drank Four Peak’s Kilt Lifter when I’m layover at Phoenix Sky because you can’t get it out east yet. Good stuff too.

kilt lifter

You can get Kilt Lifter at Zinc Brasserie’s in Terminal 4. By the way, Zinc Brasserie’s is the only place you need to eat at Phoenix Sky. Don’t bother with anywhere else. I literally schedule layovers at Phoenix Sky to eat there. Place is freaking awesome. I’ve never been at Manchester long enough to eat there, so I don’t know what they’ve got.

Anyways, despite my affection for Four Peaks and Smuttynose I’m rather unnerved they’ve decided to sell out like this. Don’t you go ahead and think breweries host campaign events for free. They want payback, eventually. A phone call here, a campaign contribution there. A little access, a chance to remind somebody later when you need a favor. A concept otherwise known as collusion.

If the airlines are colluding against the law they’ve been doing it for at least a decade. And now the Justice Department wants to get involved? Honestly I’m surprised they’re actually doing something. Businesses have gotten so good at rigging the game or selling out that I’m always surprised when the consumer is handed a real victory, like when Comcast recently lost the chance to become the true giant octopus.

But I kind of expect the airlines to break the rules. They’ve been doing it since the dawn of flight. When Sarsaparilla Airways was shoving $2 bills into Woodrow Wilson’s pocket. But beer is supposed to be better than that. Beer is for us, more personal, intimate. You drink it at home, while relaxing with good television or a great book. Beyond crooked awfulness. It irks me to see them in the game this way.

Is beer the next total sell out? I guess we’ll know if Bush 3 or Clinton 2 wins, and then I stroll into my local shopette and see six packs of Robust Porter and Kilt Lifter. And they’re both the exact same price.

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on symbols, hate, and freedom

I general, I think as a society we tend to get wrapped too far around symbols, or speech.  Just because somebody gets offended can’t mean we have to rearrange society.  On the other hand, the Confederate battle flag wasn’t flying on Charleston government property until 1962.  In other words, a bunch of then not dead Confederate generals in 1878 didn’t think the flag should be there.  But a bunch of idiots decided to put it there in 1962 just to make themselves very, very clear about what they stood for.

Whatever your understanding of the Civil War, it’s pretty apparent that in the end one side was dedicated to the principle of living as an apartheid slave state.  And seeing as how we’re not likely to approve of flying the Nazi flag from government property, we probably should take the Confederate one down.

But at the same time I get somewhat iffy when Walmart and Amazon (Money!) decide to stop selling Confederate items.  What business is it of anybody if Steve from Minnesota wants to buy one to help reenact the Civil War with his buddies.  On the other hand, I’m the idiot who wants to burn Hitler’s art.

Just for the hell of it, I searched on Amazon to see if I could buy Nazi items.  When you search for “Nazi flag”, you realize Amazon doesn’t sell Nazi themed items.  But the first item that comes up in the search is a Soviet flag.  The Soviet Union killed more of its own people than Hitler did.  Yet you can still buy their stuff.  So one of history’s monstrosities is okay but another isn’t?

Maybe instead we should just let it go.  Forget the symbols, let people be free to make whatever purchases or decisions they want.  Then we’d get the chance to yell at the goon dressed like an SS officer at Halloween.  And we can throw rocks at him until the point of unconsciousness.

Fixing hate is about more than just symbols.  Remove the Confederate flag from human existence, and black men are still nine times as likely to end up behind bars as their white counterparts.  Fixing this shit is hard.  If only society could muster 1/7 the outrage at symbols and instead get into cold, hard, facts, we’d all be a lot better off.  I wonder how many of those who are shouting about flags today, have the stamina (or desire) to talk comprehensive law and justice reform tomorrow?  Or get out there and volunteer?  Or give cash to a charity not run by a celebrity?

One last thought, part of learning from history is being able to remember it, study it, even breathe it.  You can’t erase evil, you have to bathe in it, learn from it, and then banish the hate that created it.  When Egyptian Pharaohs took control they would occasionally sweep the entire kingdom and literally chisel out the names of their enemies in order to remove their lives from history.  This is not a behavior to emulate.

We cannot chisel away hate by battling symbols.  We fight hate and gain freedom by chiseling away hate’s roots.  So okay, take the damn flag down, but then be ready to come back tomorrow to fight that much harder, on far more important battles.

The Civil War’s outcome in many ways is still not finished.  We have a legacy we’ve inherited that requires us to keep going.  We still have work to do.  Freedom is our responsibility.  To hold it and grow it.  We must keep fighting.

dayattheoffice

ordinary, average men inviting us to pick up where they left off; and ensure their sacrifice was worth every bit of it